An electronic component mounting line through which a mounted substrate is manufactured by mounting electronic components on a substrate is constructed by coupling together screen printers that print solder bonding paste on electronic components, electronic component loaders for loading the electronic components on a printed substrate, and the like. Producing multiple products in small quantities has recently become a predominant production style in the electronic industry, too. Therefore, a production facility has also become required to have a facility configuration that exhibits both the ability to achieve high production efficiency and flexibility to adapt to a variety of production styles.
In order to realize such a production facility, various characteristic mechanisms and configurations have hitherto been brought into a layout of an electronic component mounting line and machines constituting the electronic component mounting line. For instance, a configuration including a plurality of independently movable substrate transport conveyors (see Patent Document 1) is used for the purpose of enhancing transport efficiency of substrates and simultaneous transport of a plurality of substrates. Simultaneous production of a plurality of substrate thereby becomes possible, to thus achieve superior production efficiency. Further, a facility that has the superior capability of addressing production of multiple products and that enables simultaneous production of a plurality of types of substrates can be implemented.
In order to simultaneously produce a plurality of substrates, a screen printer's throughput capacity to feed solder bonding paste to a substrate must be increased so as to meet the number of substrates to be produced. For this reason, there have been employed various mechanisms, such as a configuration for arranging a plurality of screen printers in series along an electronic component mounting line, to thus increase overall throughput capacity (see Patent Document 2), a method for increasing the number of substrates to be processed by simultaneously printing two substrates by means of a single mask plate (see Patent Document 3), and a method for increasing the number of substrates to be processed by arranging independent screen printing mechanisms in series within a single system.
Patent Document 1: JP-A-4-129630
Patent Document 2: JP-A-2004-142299
Patent Document 3: JP-A-2000-37847
Patent Document 4: JP-A-2000-168040